UCD Dublin European Institute

DEI Working Paper 09-03

What factors determine bargaining power in EU negotiations?

Stefanie Bailer

Working Paper: © Stefanie Bailer 2009

This paper should be cited as follows: Stefanie Bailer, What factors determine bargaining power in EU negotiations?, UCD Dublin European Institute Working Paper 09-03, May 2009.

All opinions expressed are the sole responsibility of the authors.

Cover Photo: © European Community

About the Authors

Stefanie Bailer is Lecturer at the University of ZurichContact: http://www.ipz.uzh.ch/institut/mitarbeitende/staff/bailer/ph.html

About the Dublin European Institute

The Dublin European Institute (DEI) supports scholarly research and debate on the sources, processes and implications of European integration and governance. Based within the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin, the DEI is the oldest and largest university centre for research on European affairs in the Republic of Ireland.

For more information, see: http://www.ucd.ie/dei or contact: Dublin European Institute, UCD School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, IRELAND (email: dei@ucd.ie)

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What factors determine bargaining power in EU negotiations?

Abstract

Since EU Council of Ministers negotiations remain characteristically secretive, outsiders have but

little knowledge of the actual factors that determine bargaining power in these negotiations.

However, previous research has shown that gains and losses in these negotiations are relatively

equally shared amongst the EU members, and that the influence of exogenous power resources—

such as votes are more important than endogenous resources such as bargaining skill (Bailer, 2004).

This article presents an overview of the current literature on bargaining power in EU

negotiations. I suggest several areas for future research regarding the partisan preferences of EU

governments and the way this influences their coalition formation behaviour. More attention should

be paid to the context of these negotiations, their differing meeting frequencies, and the resulting

reciprocity logics. Such studies will benefit from analysing the context with multilevel analysis, and

from recently published data sets. However, it merits noting that more efforts to generate and

analyse negotiation positions will be necessary, in order to see what bargaining power can achieve in

the Council.

Key word: European Union Council of Ministers - bargaining power – negotiation – partisan

preferences – reciprocity

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1. Introduction

By now, many studies have emphasized the secrecy of Council of Ministers negotiations, illuminating

the problems involved in studying a subject that is not publicly accessible (Schneider et al., 2006).

However, this problem is quite frequent in negotiation studies, since many international negotiations

are not disclosed to the public or the media. Few observer-written accounts of actual negotiations

exist, and most analyses rely on secondary sources like interviews and documents. (Moravcsik, 1998;

Zelikow and Rice, 1997). This secrecy is one of the reasons why there is comparatively little

knowledge about the Council of Ministers, in contrast to other EU bodies like the European

Parliament which offers transcripts of parliamentary speeches and voting records for researchers.

Hence, most of the studies about the Council of Ministers concentrate on the actual voting

behaviour ((Hagemann and De Clerck-Sachsse, 2007a; Hagemann and De Clerck-Sachsse, 2007b;

Hagemann and Hoyland, 2008; Mattila, 2004; Mattila, 2006; Mattila, 2007; Mattila and Lane, 2001),

the political dimensions represented (Thomson et al., 2004; Zimmer et al., 2005), or aim to predict

bargaining outcomes with various game-theoretic negotiation models (Thomson et al., 2006). Only a

handful of studies focus on the actual power distribution in the Council, or discuss which power

resources are necessary in order to achieve one’s bargaining goals in this organization (Bailer, 2004;

Bailer, 2006).

In the first section of the following article, I will outline the state of research on bargaining

power in the Council. I will look at studies of both the Council of Ministers and the EU Council

summit meetings—although there are important differences between these two negotiation rounds,

as I will later point out. In the second part of the article I will discuss further and so far neglected

research areas.

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2. Bargaining Power Resources in the Council of Ministers – a Review of the Literature

Like many scholars, I use Max Weber’s (Weber, 1921:28 ) famous definition of power, described as

the possibility to realise one’s will even against the resistance of others. Assuming that this ability

stems from power resources and not from pure luck (Barry, 1980a; Barry, 1980b), I distinguish

between various power facets that can stem from resources such as voting power over economic

size, bargaining skill and expertise. As the bargaining resources vary, so do their classifications.

Whether they range from a classification between state/institutional/individual resources of power

(Tallberg, 2008) or a distinction between exogenous and endogenous power (Bailer, 2004), most

researchers agree to distinguish between state-related resources—which are relatively easy to measure

and easily observable by outsiders—and concepts that are more dependent on the individual

negotiators and harder to grasp, such as strategies and skill. Sticking to this distinction, I review the

current state of research on bargaining power resources in the Council in the following subsections.

2.1 Voting Power

Most prominent within in the bargaining power literature is the voting power index literature, which

calculates the expected power of a member state by the number of votes available in qualified

majority voting situations. Power indices indicate an actor’s chances of being the pivotal player in a

negotiation—i.e., how likely they are to turn a losing coalition into a winning one, such as the

Shapley-Shubik index (1954), or a winning coalition into a losing one, as in the Banzhaf index (1965).

Voting power studies are especially useful for evaluating different voting distributions in the Council

after various enlargement rounds (Widgrén, 1994) and within the context of possible country

coalitions (Hosli, 1996). Perhaps most notable is their finding that smaller member states actually

have more voting power than their number of votes might indicate. In addition, another useful

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analysis has shown that the redistribution of votes at the EU summit of Nice in 2000 favoured the

big and nearly-big member states; in particular Spain received a large increase in voting weight

(Baldwin, 2005; Baldwin and Widgrén, 2004). Furthermore, Widgrén (2008) has successfully

elucidated the gains and losses in voting weight in a comparison of the Nice rules and the intended

rules after the Lisbon Treaty and thus contributed to an evaluation of the effects of these treaties for

the member states.

It is important to note, however, that voting power indices are subject to criticism—most

notably that they ignore important facets of the negotiation process, and that they do not take factors

such as agenda-setting rights and preferences of bargaining parties into account (Garrett and

Tsebelis, 1999; Garrett and Tsebelis, 2001). Some modellers have responded to these critiques by

incorporating preferences into their voting indices (Steunenberg et al., 1999); (Pajala and Widgrén,

2004; Widgrén, 20003). Nonetheless, additional bargaining power resources, such as skill or the

influence of different bargaining contexts, are not captured in these approaches; in light of this, I

consider voting power to be a useful analytical tool, but one that needs to be enriched with additional

actor information.

2.2 Power due to economic size

The pure size of states, defined in economic terms, has traditionally been considered as power

resource (Moravcsik, 1998) simply because larger states possess a more important position in

international economic networks (Keohane and Nye, 1989) and also have the latent power of

blocking trade. The effect of this power resource is not yet clear. In Council of Ministers

negotiations, Bailer (2004) has found a positive effect for the bargaining resource of economic size.

Tallberg (2008) confirms this finding for EU summit meetings, a finding derived from qualitative

interviews with participating heads of states. Slapin (2006), however, could not find significant

effects for economic size in his systematic study of the intergovernmental Amsterdam negotiations.

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The analysis of the power resource votes versus economic size also suffers from the fact that these

two measurements are so strongly correlated; it is difficult to distinguish them in practice.

2.3 Institutional Power

Apart from these state’s or governments’ resources, institutional power is a possible resource of

power in EU negotiations, and in intergovernmental negotiations in particular (Slapin, 2008;

Tallberg, 2008). Slapin’s (2007) analysis of the intergovernmental Amsterdam treaty negotiations

shows that exit rights and veto rights (Slapin, 2008) grant more leeway to bargaining governments in

intergovernmental negotiations than economic size or other resources would suggest. However, for

the focus of our research—that is to say, the bargaining power in Council negotiations—only veto

rights are actually relevant, since the exit of a country will only be ultima ratio and relatively rare. Veto

power, however, is evenly distributed amongst member states in decisions under unanimity.

Apart from exit and veto rights, the power to set the agenda (Kingdon, 1995; Niskanen,

1971) is a power resource which every member state receives for six months in a rotation cycle.

Several studies of the power of the presidency have used the DEU data set to show that the right to

preside over Council sessions and to manipulate the agenda actually leads to more power for this limited

period of time—especially in the last stages of the decision making process (Schalk et al., 2007;

Thomson, 2008; Warntjen, 2008).

2.4 Bargaining Skill and Information

A negotiator’s level of bargaining skill is predicated upon its individual psychological characteristics

and bargaining strategies (Snyder and Diesing, 1977:194). The various degrees of negotiation skills

of diplomats—dependent on their selection mechanisms, experience and education—may have an

influence on the course of negotiations (Hopmann, 1996:104). Although the more popular

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negotiation literature (Zartman and Berman, 1982) generally assumes that skill levels matter, there is

relatively little systematic research about the influence of bargaining skill on negotiations, let alone in

the Council of Ministers negotiations. In game theory John Nash (1950) was the first to incorporate

the fact that various players can vary according to their differing skill levels into his model.

As for EU Council summits, Tallberg (2008) finds that personal authority and expertise seem

to matter in intergovernmental negotiations, more so than the sizes of states. A contradictory result

has been found for the Council of Ministers, where skill does not seem to influence the bargaining

success of a country’s representative too strongly (Bailer, 2004). Investigations of this question suffer

from the problem of measuring skill in a satisfying way; mostly it has been measured with interviews

in which interview partners have estimated skill qualitatively (Tallberg, 2008) or quantitatively on a

numerical scale (Bailer, 2004).

Another related concept concerns the degree of information a negotiator possesses, as well as

his position in the council’s communication networks. Naurin (2007a) measures this “network

capital” by taking stock of how desired an actor is as a communication partner in the eyes of his

colleagues, in the council’s working groups. In his study he employs a telephone survey to find out

which country’s representatives communicate with each other in order to detect coalition patterns.

One of his findings concerns the varying network density between member states; indeed, the larger

member states possess more intense communication links with other Council members than the

smaller ones. Beyers and Dierickx (1997) came to a similar conclusion when analysing the working

groups of the Council.

2.5 Domestic Constraints

Related to the concept of bargaining skill is the skilful use of a constrained bargaining position.

Domestic constraints can be distinguished in institutional constraints such as referenda requirements

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or subnational actors as the German Bundesländer and in actor constraints like euroskeptical voters

or fierce interest groups such as farmers. Starting with Schelling’s(1960) “paradox of weakness”,

Putnam (1988) popularized the notion that international-level negotiators can use their constrained

win-set to ask for concessions from their negotiation partners. However, most formal modellers now

agree that this finding has to be qualified slightly. Although Iida (1993), Mo (1995) and Tarar (2001)

are able to elucidate situations in which negotiators benefit from domestic constraints, they all

condition the conjecture in one way or the other. One implication of this work, for instance, lies in

the fact that that negotiators risk a process breakdown, if the non-constrained governments are not

well-informed about the constraints of the other side.

For EU summits meetings, Schneider and Cederman (1994) have shown that domestic

ratification constraints can yield important power at EU negotiations; this has also been confirmed

by Hug and König (2001) and König and Hug (2000). In addition, Slapin (2006) has convincingly

described the impact of domestic constraints on intergovernmental negotiations, such as the

Amsterdam Treaty negotiations. However, in the case of the Council of Ministers, a positive effect

stemming from domestic constraints on bargaining success has not yet be confirmed (Bailer and

Schneider, 2005; Schneider et al., 2008).

This brief review of the current state of bargaining power shows that much remains to be

done. The most comprehensive and systematic research has so far taken place in the realm of voting

power indices, which fail to account for many facets of negotiators. Studies that incorporate

additional bargaining power resources are limited to certain periods and measurement challenges. In

the following paragraphs, I highlight some neglected research areas and suggest ways for addressing

these gaps.

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3. Further research areas and challenges

3.1 Opportunities for Coalition Formation – the Role of Partisan Preferences

One relatively neglected area of EU summit and Council negotiation study is the influence of the

partisan preferences of EU governments. In their analysis of the positions of national parties on

European integration, Marks and Wilson (2000) convincingly demonstrate that partisan party families

are more influential on negotiations than nationality. However, this strand of the literature

concentrates predominantly on the question of whether the Left-Right dimension is more important

than the Anti-Pro-EU-Integration dimension, for explaining party positions in the EU (Hix, 2001;

Hooghe et al., 2002; Ringe, 2005; van der Eijk and Franklin, 2004), and in particular in the European

Parliament (Hix et al., 2006).These studies do not investigate whether a majority of Europhile

countries or right-wing parties can increase an actor’s bargaining power.

Since the partisan composition of governments is a highly influential aspect of the

democratic processes in the member states, it is amazing that the influence of the state governments’

various partisan orientations in the Council has not received more attention. If the partisan

dimension plays a role in the Council, we should expect a positive influence from negotiation

partners with a similar ideological orientation. Being closer to the ideological median of member

states might benefit a government by providing it with more possible coalition partners. We do not

know whether a right-wing government profits from more right-wing oriented Council, or whether

the partisan similarity of negotiators influences their preparedness to shift positions, to compromise

or to form coalitions.Theoretical guidance to analyze this question can be found in the theories for

coalition formation. Robert Axelrod pointed out that a coalition which is to form for a winning

coalition must be a connected minimum winning coalition. Axelrod argued that coalitions would not

form if they are not situated next to each other so that he assumed similar preferences as a

precondition for coalitions. Ideological similarity between coalition partners reduces conflict and

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they are especially likely to form when coalition deals are difficult to attain and keep over time

(Carrubba and Volden, 2004). Following from this knowledge of coalition theories in parliamentary

democracies, future researchers should pay attention to the question whether similar partisan

orientation of a government facilitates joining a coalition and turning it from a losing into a winning

coalition. For a leftist government the costs involved with joining a coalition of left-wing

governments might be lower that joining a coalition of right-wing governments sharing the same

policy-preferences. The assumption of such an investigation is the differentiation between issue-

specific negotiation positions and the partisan orientations of the EU governments whose influence

is still debated.

For the European Council, Manow et al (2008) have been among the first to systematically

investigate the impact of various party ideological Council summit configurations and the impact that

a more left- or right-leaning majority of EU governments might have on EU summit decisions. They

have discovered that the political center of gravity in the Council has moved from the right in the

1950s towards the left in the 1990s, and that this move has provoked a change in social policy.

Tallberg and Johansson (2008) stand in opposition to this conclusion, however, with their finding

that there is less party mobilization potential than expected in the Council summit meetings. In their

view issue-specific, interest-based coalitions of states are more important to explaining decision-

making in the Council, on various negotiation topics.

For the Council of Ministers, it is also not clear whether the Left-Right dimension exists, let

alone if it can be used as a bargaining resource. The findings depend partly on the data that is used,

and if this data represents final voting data or initial negotiation positions; Both Hagemann (2007)

and Mattila (2004) find the Left-Right-wing dimension of EU governments to be one significant

independent variable to explain the voting behaviour in the Council of Ministers. Hagemann and

Hoyland (2008) find that the governments with similar party-political preferences show a similar

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voting behaviour in the Council using all Council voting records from 1999 to 2007. However,

Hagemann and Hoyland do not account for other possible explanations for voting behaviour (such

as similar negotiation positions) and study voting at a relatively high aggregated level not

differentiating between policy areas.

Using the DEU data set, which includes initial negotiation positions (Thomson et al., 2006), a

Left-Right dimension could not yet be identified. Several analysts using these data have suggested

that the political dimensions break down along a North-South dimension (Thomson et al., 2004;

Zimmer et al., 2005), more specifically a regulatory versus market-based approach (Thomson et al.,

2004) or an EU budget-related one (Zimmer et al., 2005). In this manner, the structural and domestic

interests of the states prove more germane in explaining the negotiation position of an EU

government in Council negotiations than partisan preferences. In addition, Naurin (2007b) rather

detects a geographical trend in the communication patterns of the EU Council working groups

rather than evidence to suggest that partisan preferences impact the communication behaviour of the

EU Council working groups. Even in the case of government changes, the communication patterns

do not appear to be affected (Naurin, 2008).

On a promising note, newly-released data sets by Warntjen et al. (2008) and Döring and

Manow (2008) contain the party preferences of all EU governments since the 1950s. These will

allow for more in-depth studies of whether a more right- or left-leaning Council composition

influences negotiations. Because of this, researchers will be better able to examine the minutiae of

how these different Council compositions influence actors’ abilities to find coalition partners, for

example, or unite with supporters of certain policy proposals.

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3.2 The level and frequency of meetings and its Implications for the Negotiations –

Reciprocity and the Use of Strategies

Although studies of EU summit negotiations (the “European Council”) and the Council of Ministers

(the “Council of the European Union”) have been cited in this article nearly interchangeably, it is

important to note the difference between these two negotiation rounds. In EU summits, heads of

states and diplomatic support staffs negotiate with one another, while the negotiations in the Council

of Ministers play out over various discussion rounds from the working groups via the Coreper to the

actual Council of Ministers rounds (Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace, 2006)i. Nearly 80% of the

proposals are already negotiated at the lowest working group level, which is staffed with civil servants

from the EU delegations or from the national capitals; of the remaining 10-15% are negotiated by

the diplomats in Coreper and 5-10% are overseen by the ministers themselves. Some proposals

fluctuate between various negotiation levels, travelling up and down according to their degree of

contestation (Häge, 2007). I expect that in such situations personal negotiation skills and their

effects are distinctly harder to detect since the individual negotiators treating the issue change so

frequently. This undermines the analysis of bargaining power resources linked to traits such as skill

in Council of Ministers meetings. It stands in marked contrast to EU summits, where one

negotiation round can essentially be investigated with the same negotiators and facilitates the analysis

of more individual bargaining power resources. Furthermore, it has not yet been investigated

whether certain bargaining power resources matter more on some levels than others.

The variation in meeting frequency between the Council and the EU summit negotiations,

and the variations in frequency between various Council formations has only recently received more

scholarly attention (Häge, 2007:305). Dependent on workload, some civil servants in the Council

meet every week, and are based in their respective delegations in Brussels (as in the budgetary

working group); other groups consist of civil servants who meet twice a year and are sent to Brussels

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by their national ministries. Häge (2007) shows that a strikingly disparate number of decisions is

taken in the various Council and working groups: most of the decisions are debated in internal

market and agriculture councils, whereas culture and health councils effect the lowest numbers of

decisions. I hypothesize that this has various implications for negotiation behaviours, in terms of

reciprocity and the use of strategies.

Research on the cooperation of actors has shown that the opportunity for reciprocation

(returning to one’s exchange partner a behaviour of the same valence that s/he just performed (Parks

and Komorita, 1998:151)) facilitates cooperation (Keohane, 1986); Axelrod (1984) called this the

effect the “shadow of the future”. This form of reciprocity describes a “trial and error learning” in

which states adjust their behaviour when they realize that they are better off cooperating than trying

to gain an advantage that may be neutralized by retaliation (Welch Larson, 1998:131).

Negotiation partners who engage in relatively frequent negotiations are likely more

consensus-orientated and willing to grant concessions, since they might soon be in a position to ask

for favours in the same round. They are also more likely to recognize that long-term losses of mutual

defection might outweigh the short-term gains of defection (Jönsson et al., 1998). Conversely, parties

who engage in less frequent negotiations would seem likely to be more adversaries and end with

more losers and fewer compromises in which long amendments and appendices try to appease all

interests involved. This has already been stated for international negotiations; indeed, the more

confrontational negotiation style of Europe in the 17th century, fraught with power asymmetries, has

been transformed in a more compromise-oriented negotiation style, due to narrower networks and

greater cooperation (Mastenbroek, 1991; Saner, 2000). For the Council working groups, Fouillex et

al. (2001) note different degrees of “familiarity” dependent on the various meeting frequencies of

telecommunication and information society working groups.

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A social-constructivist interpretation of this would include socialization effects in these

rounds, and hypothesize that working in these groups changes values and norms, which in turn

influences negotiation behaviour (Egeberg et al., 2003). However, in his survey of working group

officials, Beyers (2005) was unable to find evidence for socialization. This is confirmed by Häge’s

(2007) analysis of the likelihood that topics get decided at the working group level rather than the

ministerial level. He found that working groups which meet more often than others do not manage to

decide more issues in their groups than groups that meet less frequently. Therefore, I expect that it is

the rationalist exchange logic and not socialization which facilitates negotiations in more frequent

negotiations.

Future research should investigate whether the effect of bargaining power resources depends

on the frequency of meetings. In very frequent meeting rounds skilful and forward-looking

negotiators might be able to gain more in their exchanges with their negotiation partners than in

negotiation rounds which do not offer these opportunities due to their rarity. The more often the

negotiators have the possibility to exchange favours and ask for concessions, the more important

internal power resources such as skill might be which is a logic also postulated by integrative

bargaining theorists (Elgström and Jönsson 2000)

However, the varying frequency of negotiation rounds might also have implications for the

occurrence of strategic positions and the use of strategies versus assuming sincere positions.

Strategies such as package deals, logrolling, or the use of the “paradox of weakness” – a constrained

winset due to domestic opposition (Schelling, 1960)—depend heavily on the credibility of actors

(Hovi, 1998). In information-rich environments where negotiation counterparts know each other

well, it is a lot harder to “bluff,” or to exaggerate constraints, than in bargaining rounds where

negotiators do not know each other—or the situations in the respective member states—very well.

Adapting to positions after having signalled a different position at the beginning of negotiations leads

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to relocation costs and a possible credibility loss (Thurner et al., 2003) as the literature on signalling

games shows. This could explain why negotiation delegations have sometimes achieved spectacular

successes due to domestic constraints (e.g. the British budget rebate, the Danish and British opt-out

of the Maastricht Treat) in summit negotiations. By contrast, domestic constraints on a permanent

basis, such as the influence of the German Länder on the German negotiation positions, might prove

to be a burden on the negotiation strategy of a delegation. The effect of this paradox of weakness

strategy might wear off if it goes on a permanent basis. Therefore, I assume that the use of strategies

is rarer, and that negotiation positions are more sincere than strategic in frequent negotiations (Bailer,

2007). To my knowledge, no comparative investigation into the various effects of bargaining power

in the different Council rounds, in differing policy groupings and at differing levels (working groups,

Coreper, Council), has yet been conducted. This offers exciting new avenues for further exploring

the influence of the “you always meet twice” phenomenon.

An analysis of the different working groups and Council rounds would allow a more nuanced

exploration of whether the differing characteristics of policy sectors influence the negotiation

process. Previous research (Bailer, 2004) has shown that the influence of bargaining power resources

depends on the specific policy fields. However this study only distinguished between agriculture and

internal market policies (Bailer, 2004). In future research it is necessary to differentiate between the

wide arrays of policy areas dealt with in the European Union. Negotiation areas might differ to the

degree of expertise required (Quaglia, 2010) so that expert knowledge in highly technical or

jurisdictional affairs might develop into a sort of bargaining power resource which might not be

needed in other more political areas. The degree of integration—as measured by Hooghe and Marks

(2001), for example—the levels of Europeanization, and the general levels of salience attached to

certain policy issues could be analysed using multilevel analysis. By these means, analysts might be

able to account for characteristics of actors and negotiation topics in a more sophisticated way, and

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regard the effects of negotiation issues not as “noise” but as interesting and relevant effects offering

more insight into the effects of independent variables that had been ignored (Rabe-Hesketh and

Skrondal, 2008; Snijders and Bosker, 1999).

3.4 Improving Measurement

As mentioned in the introduction, a common problem of negotiation studies lies in the secrecy of

negotiations and a subsequent lack of data. In the Council of Ministers, votes (Mattila, 2004), vote

explanations (Hagemann and Hoyland, 2008), position data collected with interviews (Bueno de

Mesquita and Stokman, 1994; Thomson et al., 2006), and negotiation documents (Bueno de

Mesquita and Stokman, 1994; König, 1997) have all been used as data resource to study decision

making behaviour. The votes and explanations are really only suitable for studying the final decision-

making behaviour of the governments—and in particular, actors’ aptness to disagree and to vote

against the majority (Sullivan and Selck, 2007). Indeed, these tools are useful mostly for parsing the

results of negotiation processes. In order to study actual negotiations and informal exchange

processes, it is necessary to have negotiation position data from the beginning of each bargaining

round, and to compare them with the final bargaining result. One source of such information comes

in the form of interviews conducted with negotiation participants, a method which is time-

consuming and relatively expensive. The most extensive collection of negotiation positions has been

provided by the DEU project (Thomson et al., 2006); presently, there have been several attempts to

extend this data set to include the new member states (Thomson, 2007). One alternative to these

interviews is the analysis of negotiation documents. An example of such an approach may be found

in several studies about the intergovernmental negotiations leading to the Treaty of Amsterdam.

where preparatory synopses of all the actors’ negotiation positions led to several studies of these

summit negotiations (Thurner et al., 2003).

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A so-far undervalued data resource may be found in the Council negotiation protocols,

which have been published for several years and are available on the Council websiteii . These

documents contain summaries of the decisions, and are not transcripts of the discussions (Sullivan

and Selck, 2007). However, in some cases, the progress of negotiations is traceable since the

positions and disagreements over the bargaining issues are noted in a relatively standardized way.

The potential to evaluate of these documents with text-coding documents has not been fully

exploited yet. Sullivan and Selck (2007) discuss the possibility of using the wordscores technique

(Laver et al., 2003) for analysing Council protocols—although they admit that there are still several

obstacles to the application of this technique (e.g. the salience estimation of technical points). These

points are included in the Council protocols, but might not represent actual negotiation issues. An

alternative would be an analysis of Agence Europe, an extensive news service on EU activities. A

thorough investigation of how information from Agence Europe could be used to identify negotiation

issues and how information from the Council protocols could be evaluated to generate negotiations

positions would promise valuable data for assessing the effect of bargaining power in the Councils.

4. Conclusion

Since the Council of Ministers is the most important decision-making body in the European Union,

especially when it comes to day-to-day legislation in the EU, it is desirable to acquire more

knowledge of the role of bargaining power in this body, and of the bargaining success achieved from

these power resources. In a general attempt to acquire more data on decision-making in the EU, I

propose testing and evaluating new text-coding instruments in order to generate traceable and less

expensive data on negotiation positions in the Council. However, these have to be treated with

caution, and compared with the more expensive but possibly more encompassing interview

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information. More data on negotiation positions in more policy areas would allow for more research

into bargaining resources, and the effects of these bargaining resources in varying negotiation

contexts. To this end, I would expect varying effects, dependent on the frequency of meetings due to

varying reciprocity logics. Additionally, the data sets that are already available should be used to more

carefully study whether the most important political dimension in European politics – that is to say,

the Left-Right dimension – matters for the effect of bargaining power in the Council. The already

existing knowledge about the importance of hard bargaining factors such as economic size and votes

should be enriched with highlighting the dependence of its effect on the negotiation context and the

possibility to form coalitions.

Stefanie Bailer is lecturer and researcher at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Center for Comparative and International Studies

University of Zurich

Seilergraben 53

8001 Zürich

email: stefanie.bailer@ipz.uzh.ch

I thank the participancts of the workshop „Negotiation Theory and the EU: The State of the Art”,

Thilo Bodenstein, Dirk Leuffen and Gerald Schneider for their helpful comments.

18

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